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Four cores are not always better than two. I recently got some quality time with Qualcomm's new super-phone platform, the S4 MSM8960, and it proves that none of the lazy ways consumers and press use to describe processor speed are going to apply anymore.

This will be the heart of high-end smartphones to come, and I'm going to try to explain why it's important to the average smartphone buyer. If you're looking for a 9-page discourse on pipelines and data structures, turn to the hands-on over at AnandTech instead. They know more about chip architecture than I do.

The quick summary: the 8960 is really fast. It fits into phones. It enables smooth, high-def gaming and media, and it significantly boosts Android Web browsing speed. And it's coming soon to a phone or tablet near you; we're likely to see it first in phones released at Mobile World Congress next week such as the Asus Padfone.

The 8960 is the first of Qualcomm's Series 4 (S4) chips, which share a similar architecture but will vary in speed and mobile network support. I'll be referring to the 8960 and S4 interchangeably below, but I'll also explain how S4 will expand beyond the 8960.

How We Tested Qualcomm's New Chip I got my MSM8960 in a Qualcomm Mobile Development Platform, which isn't a real phone. It's a brick that Qualcomm sells to phone manufacturers and software developers to show off its chip. A big, black rectangle, it has a 13-megapixel camera on the back and a 1024-by-600 screen. That's a weird resolution, and it makes it a little tough to compare performance directly against existing phones in the market.

The MDM runs Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich," but it doesn't have Android Market, and it doesn't even make phone calls. It runs apps just fine, though. I installed a bunch of APKs I had backed up from one of my other phones using the Android developer kit, and it was time to test. I put the MSM8960 through all of our standard benchmarks and then some:

NenaMark 2 is a graphics benchmark that measures performance with OpenGL ES 2.0, a popular graphics API. An3DBenchXL is another 3D graphics benchmark.

Browsermark is an all-encompassing, Web-based browsing benchmark that focuses on the performance of Web apps.

SunSpider is a well-known JavaScript benchmark for Web browsing performance.

CaffeineMark and Linpack are both brute-force CPU math benchmarks.

We don't usually report exact benchmark numbers on phones, because I don't want people to draw inaccurate conclusions. There are so many layers to the smartphone experience (such as the skins manufacturers put on top of Android) that a 10 percent difference on one benchmark usually isn't noticeable in the day to day. But Qualcomm wanted us to check out the raw processor here - so here we are.

The new Qualcomm S4 chip blew out the competition on the two Web-browser-based benchmarks. On Browsermark, it scored 16 percent higher than the quad-core Tegra 3 and 32 percent higher than the dual-core TI OMAP. On Sunspider, it scored 19 percent better than the Tegra 3 and 30 percent better than the OMAP. Those are the most important benchmarks in my view, because they use a real-world application.

On CaffeineMark and Linpack, the two heavy-duty math benchmarks, the Qualcomm S4 was also faster. On CaffeineMark, it scored 19 percent higher than the Tegra 3 and 64 percent higher than the TI OMAP. On Linpack, it scored 66 percent higher than the Tegra 3 and more than one and a half times as high as the OMAP.

The 8960 uses Qualcomm's new Adreno 225 GPU. Graphics performance was solid, and surprisingly, better than the Nvidia chip's. The MSM8960 will ship in "Vsync On" mode, which basically means it tops out at 60 frames per second to keep the screen stable. The MDM ran right up against the 60-fps limit in Nenamark 2, which neither of the other competing chips could. (Admittedly, the Tegra 3 in the eee Pad is pushing a third more pixels on the tablet's larger screen.) It also got higher scores than the competition on An3DBenchXL.

Sounds awesome, huh? There's a catch. It's possible to program software to work better on one kind of chip than another. The MDM's scores on the overall Antutu benchmark were disappointing. Integer and floating-point results were much lower than the Tegra 3, although they were higher than the TI OMAP4. 2D and 3D scores were a wee bit better than competitors, although not by much.

Qualcomm says that's because Antutu's tests scale linearly with the number of cores - in other words, it's using multiple cores too well, from Qualcomm's perspective. That means a quad-core processor has a huge advantage over a dual-core processor, even a very fast one, on that specific test.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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